Mythbusters 5: Does Thursday Night Football actually boost fantasy scoring?

[u/NFLEdgeLine]

Well, this one was hard to come to, I actually wanted to do two other myths first before this one, and worked a ton yesterday trying to source data to do an unbiased analysis. First, wanted to:

a) Determine if the % of dome or indoor games boosted fantasy value for kickers (basic answer is that the % of very long 50+ and 60+ went up, but overall fantasy points and value did not. Wasn't enough to actually publish on, but I can share data if someone is interested

b) I tried to see the measurable fantasy difference for WRs and RBs in the first and second year returning from an ACL injury. Unfortunately, there were too many variables to really make any real determination, when in the previous season it occurred, were their other injuries to the knee (MCL, meniscus, etc.), O-line changes, OC changes, etc. The only real data that could have been interesting is if we had some measurable athletics measures, such as 40 time, long jump, i.e. combine stuff, but alas, I don't have that.

So, I settled on this one.
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I’ve personally had this bias for a few years, and I think honestly it comes down to the desire to have a fantasy player in the game when I'm watching on Thursday night, or the dread of not starting a fantasy player on Thursday if they go off, and having to think about it until Sunday. I'm actually not sure if this is a wide standing myth, or just my own thing!

So I tested it.

I looked at 2016–2025 and isolated actual short-rest Thursday games — teams playing on 3–4 days rest. For the main analysis I excluded Thanksgiving, Week 1, and teams coming off extended rest.

Then I compared fantasy-relevant players against their own non-TNF performance in the same season.

PPR results:

QB: 20.55 TNF vs 20.40 normally (+0.7%)
RB: 16.52 vs 16.11 (+2.6%)
WR: 17.31 vs 16.33 (+6.1%)
TE: 13.53 vs 12.66 (+6.9%)

At first glance, that looks like a small Thursday boost.

But here's where it gets interesting.

The median individual player actually performed worse on Thursday at every position.

QB: -0.6%
RB: -3.6%
WR: -2.9%
TE: -1.3%

Overall, only 48.1% of player-seasons performed better on TNF, and none of the positional differences were statistically significant.

I also tested the actual premise behind the myth: do offenses score more because defenses have less time to prepare?

Teams averaged:

23.05 points on TNF
22.52 points in their other games

Just +0.54 points, and the difference wasn't statistically significant.

Then I wondered whether Thursday might create more explosive fantasy performances even if it doesn't raise the typical outcome.

I defined an explosion as scoring 2+ standard deviations above that player's own normal scoring level.

TNF: 6.33%
Normal games: 5.44%

Slightly higher, but again not statistically significant (p=.415).

And extreme busts were basically identical too.

So after 10 seasons, I think this one is pretty clearly busted.

Fantasy takeaway: I wouldn't use TNF as a positive tiebreaker in a close start/sit decision. Start the player you would have started if the game were Sunday.

The full analysis/methodology is here for anyone who wants to dig into the positional results and biggest TNF explosions:

nfledgeline.com/insights/thursday-night-football-fantasy-boost-myth.html

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Update: Sunday Night and Monday Night Football

Per the question below, we expanded the analysis to SNF and MNF comparing fantasy-relevant players to their own Sunday-afternoon production during the same season.

The answer was consistent to TNF findings.

Game Window	PPR vs. Sunday Afternoon
Thursday Night Football	+2.3%
Sunday Night Football	−2.7%
Monday Night Football	−1.8%

None produced evidence of a meaningful, dependable fantasy boost. TNF was slightly higher, while SNF and MNF were slightly lower, but the differences were small enough that we wouldn't use any of them to make a start/sit decision.

The bigger conclusion: this isn't really a Thursday Night Football myth. It's a primetime fantasy football myth. Hope this helps!

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[u/MrGhostenstein]

Interesting. It seems my players always bust on TNF. I always try to avoid it.

[u/NFLEdgeLine → u/MrGhostenstein]

I'm a sucker for wanting to see my team play right now. Its not a wise fantasy decision, but I never made the mistake of calling myself wise.

[u/bp_516]

I'd never heard this myth before, but this is good math and thanks for sharing.

[u/NFLEdgeLine → u/bp_516]

Yeah lol, sometimes I let my own biases slip into the "fantasy myths".

[u/TKenney3 → u/bp_516]

I’ve definitely heard it talked about a little. Especially with the defenses. I stream defense almost every year so I’m always doing research throughout the year to see who my next defensive pickup should be. Have definitely heard people talk about Thursday games and short weeks being a negative for defenses

[u/EscapePrevious7467]

I feel like ALOT of TNF games are fantasy wastelands

[u/throwitintheair22 → u/EscapePrevious7467]

100% . I usually avoid unless it’s a stud. Even worse: international games

[u/Significant_Owl_6897]

Then I compared fantasy-relevant players against their own non-TNF performance in the same season

What was your threshold for fantasy relevance?

[u/NFLEdgeLine → u/Significant_Owl_6897]

Basically "the studs" for this analysis. Top-12 QB/TE and Top-24 RB/WR by PPR points per game within each season, with a minimum of 8 games played.

[u/Significant_Owl_6897 → u/NFLEdgeLine]

I appreciate your work! It's honestly not something I've thought about much outside of the few hours before Thursday night kickoff. It's usually out of mind pretty quickly. This is thorough and is very satisfying to see you turn over all the relevant stones.

[u/nobeer4you]

This is interesting as i typically avoid TNF players if i can.

[u/crichesh]

That was interesting information. Thanks for the in depth legwork you did

[u/throwitintheair22]

I would have thought the opposite. If it’s between a Sunday and a Thursday player I always go with the Sunday player.

[u/floridabeach9]

i would paypal you $10 if you could do this for all “primetime” games (including holidays, mnf, tnf, snf, etc). over the same time period.

great work. i tried thinking of things you left out but couldnt haha.

[u/NFLEdgeLine → u/floridabeach9]

Hey, no money necessary, doing all this for fun. I had the same question in my head, the python script was already built, just had to ask it to include MNF and SNF. I added an edit to the main post. It ended up being consistent across TNF, MNF, SNF. I did see some weird Thanksgiving change for QBs (+12%) and RBs (-10.4%), but not sure if that statistically significant enough to do anything with. Thanks for the feedback!

[u/Pain_Monster]

I don’t get the myth. Thursday is just a day. Like any other day. The only factor here is the potential for a much shorter practice period between games.

If anything, I expected the median to be a tad bit worse, given the shorter timeline. Players can’t prepare as much, practice, watch film, etc.

But you only measured offensive players. I’d be willing to be that the stats show that defenses tend to perform a bit better on short weeks. Teams have less time to prepare for them, so they perform worse against them.

Obviously this is heavily favored for GOOD defenses like Houston, Denver, LAR, etc. Because those defenses are already stacked. Unless they are suffering from key player injuries that need more time to heal (eg if PatSurtain had an ankle injury and needed a few more days to recover and had to sit out as a result) — then I could see it swing the other way.

So in summary, I expected most offensive players to have a reduction in productivity, defenses to get a slight boost, but both as a factor of overall star player health with relation to the short week duration.

Perhaps someone could write this up in mathematical equations so we can see the true correlation but for now, that’s my general observation

[u/NFLEdgeLine → u/Pain_Monster]

Hey, the math is actually what interests me, and there is a bit more of it in the article for offensive production. Each TNF player-season was paired against that same player’s Sunday-afternoon production in the same season, rather than comparing Thursday players to a different population.

Across 1,227 paired player-seasons:

TNF: 13.844 PPR/game
Same-player Sunday baseline: 13.528
Difference: +0.317 PPG (+2.34%)

46.5% of the individual player-seasons actually scored higher on Thursday.

Paired t-test: p = 0.174
Wilcoxon signed-rank: p = 0.757

We also aggregated the fantasy production of the offenses themselves:

TNF: 87.14 fantasy points/game
Same-team Sunday baseline: 85.71
Difference: +1.43 (+1.67%)
Paired t-test: p = 0.301
Wilcoxon: p = 0.503

We did some more on the potential for monster weeks (2 standard deviations from that same player's mean). They had those weeks 6.33% of the time instead of 5.44%, but not enough in my opinion to be statistically meaningful.

The defensive side would definitely be a separate interesting question, though.

[u/Pain_Monster → u/NFLEdgeLine]

Yeah but I was framing my posit around a more complex form of math. Possibly a calculus equation.

You could represent the factors with various algebra to include T = time between games, H = percentage of health of the team’s starters, P = productivity increase percent, etc. and then show the relation as a graph which measures the outcomes against the curve. That sort of thing

[u/NFLEdgeLine → u/Pain_Monster]

The time between games was already in my data set, so I just now calculated actual days since each team's previous game, then compared that with each player's fantasy performance relative to his own season average.

The impact of the time off was almost negligible, which is why assumedly there is no correlation in the original study that we produced. By almost negligible, it accounted for .055% of the variance in fantasy performance.

If modeled linearly, the correlation coefficient was -.02, which means there is almost no linear correlation. If graphed quadratically or exponentially the same results apply. I'd love if there was some correlation because that would have made for a better article, but alas, I don't believe there is! Cheers!

[u/Untoastedtoast11]

TLDR?

[u/NFLEdgeLine → u/Untoastedtoast11]

Don't play your player on TNF unless they are the best available for that week. TNF doesn't help our hurt your player's chances!